Manager (Discipline) – Senior Service Designer

Across Mortgages and Financial Wellbeing in Nationwide, we have an important journey ahead of us to build and maintain our position in the mortgage and investments markets and respond to changing customer needs, guided by our strategic drivers of more rewarding relationships, simply brilliant service, focused fit and fast, and beacon for mutual good.

Understanding of our customer needs and continuing to evolve and develop our experience strategy will be central to enabling us to deliver against this strategy and evolve Nationwide to be the building society of the future.

And we’re now looking for a Senior Service Designer to join our Service and Operational Excellence capapbility. Working in the Experience Strategy Landlord team, you will play a core role in driving understanding of how our services are delivered today, the opportunity spaces for customer and commercial improvement, and shaping future states in line with the strategic business priorities.

This role is within the Business Operations function of Mortgages and Financial Wellbeing, which is the shared service team responsible for enabling the wider business function to execute against our strategy through:

• bringing together the holistic business unit vision and priority outcomes
• providing independent challenge and support to drive performance, risk and controls
• defining our member, broker and landlord experience through journeys and processes
• shaping and delivering our colleague enablement and engagement strategy and plan
• leading our business change and business readiness agenda.

As part of the Service and Operational Excellence team within Business Operations, we’re responsible for defining, designing, and delivering frictionless, useful experiences for our customers to meet their mortgage and financial wellbeing needs. We research, we iterate, we craft, we strive – and we do it all to make sure our customer have experiences that are memorable, for all the right reasons, on every channel.

At Nationwide we offer hybrid working wherever possible. More rewarding relationships are supported through our hybrid approach, bringing colleagues together across our UK wide estate, whilst also supporting generous access to home working. We value our time in the office to solve problems, to learn, and to feel connected.

For this job you'll spend at least two days per week, or if part time you'll spend 40% of your working time, at one of our offices. If your application is successful, your hiring manager will provide further details on how this works. You can also find out more about our approach to hybrid working here.

If we receive a high volume of relevant applications, we may close the advert earlier than the advertised date, so please apply as soon as you can.

What you’ll be doing

As Senior Service Designer, you will be responsible for creating holistic and joined up understanding of our services, identifying where our service is not meeting customer needs or expectations, and articulating the business value of these opportunities to core stakeholders in our Landlord value stream. Working with colleagues and stakeholders, you'll collate and analyse multiple data and research sources to document our current state service and design future states. You'll work closely with Research to drive understanding of our customer journeys and enrich the service view with customer and colleague insight, ensuring our strategic decisions around product, propositions, and service are rooted in evidenced customer need.

You will shape the story of what we do back into the business, aligning your design narrative to the core business challenges and priorities of senior stakeholders to influence and drive change. You will support this through the shaping, sizing, and value articulation of opportunities.

You will ensure the quality and efficiency of service design activity conducted by you and others across the programme. We’ll also look to you to bring a senior and commercially-minded view towards informing priorities and scopes of work against the strategic business priorities and key performance measures.

The projects you may be involved in spans end-to-end journeys and services, so there will be no shortage of opportunities for you to utilise your Service Design expertise across a broad range of experiences.

We work in a multi-disciplinary environment, so you’ll be collaborating with our Researchers, Process Design and Mapping teams, Product Owners, Customer Journey Managers, Experience Designers (UX, UI and Content), and other Service Designers. You will proactively connect into the wider Service Design community to drive standards, principles, and help us develop the practice across Nationwide.

This is a great opportunity to help develop our growing design capabilities across Mortgages and Financial Wellbeing.

About you

To join the team as Senior Service Designer, you’ll need:

• Extensive industry experience of shaping, sizing, and conducting Service Design activity across large programmes of work to uncover commercial and customer value
• Expertise in industry-standard Service Design tools and methodologies
• Experience working with varied qualitative and quantitative data sources to analyse, synthesise, and effectively communicate opportunities for service improvement across the business
• Strong visual communication skills, with demonstratable experience developing common Service Design artefacts such as service blueprints, customer journey maps, ecosystem maps, and value proposition canvases using tools such as Miro, Figma, or similar
• Well-developed facilitation skills, able to manage competing priorities and expectations of senior stakeholders
• Exceptional business storytelling, with the capability to adjust your approach in line with the needs and interests of core stakeholder groups
• The ability to self-organise and plan work, work in multidisciplinary teams, and deliver work on time and on brief in line with evolving business priorities

 If you have experience in any of the following, even better:

• Working to agile methodologies, including an awareness of agile tools and how to use them
• Business analysis
• Designing for Vulnerability, Accessibility and Inclusion
• Working in the financial services sector
• Conducting or supporting customer research

Our Customer First behaviours are all about putting customers and members at the heart of how we work together. You can strengthen your application by showing the behaviours that resonate with you, and how you might have already demonstrated these.

• Say it straight - This is about being honest and direct with good intent and saying what needs to be said in the room. It’s also about being clear, precise, and using language that we and, importantly, our customers and members can understand.
• Push for better - This is about aiming high and constantly looking for better in how we work together and serve our customers and members.
• Get it done - This is about prioritising what will have the greatest impact, being decisive and taking accountability for delivering on the end-to-end outcome.

We know applying for jobs can sometimes feel like you’re sending an application into a black hole. We review each application individually. So, it’s a good idea to call out your most relevant experience on your application to give yourself the best chance.

The extras you’ll get

There are all sorts of employee benefits available at Nationwide, including:

• A personal pension – if you put in 7% of your salary, we’ll top up by a further 16%
• Up to 2 days of paid volunteering a year
• Life assurance worth 8x your salary
• A great selection of additional benefits through our salary sacrifice scheme
• Gympass – Access to a range of free and paid options for health and wellness.
• Access to an annual performance related bonus
• Access to training to help you develop and progress your career
• 25 days holiday, pro rata

What makes us different

Nationwide is the world’s largest building society. With over 15 million customers, we have a relationship with almost a quarter of the UK’s population. We’ve got the scale to compete with the big banks, but we’re not a bank. 

As a building society, we’re owned by our members – that’s our customers who have their current account, mortgage or savings with us. It means we can do things differently to deliver our Purpose – Banking – but fairer, more rewarding, and for the good of society. 

When you work at Nationwide, you can experience that difference for yourself. You’ll be part of a high-performing, purpose-driven organisation that offers rewarding career experiences and a highly competitive range of benefits to match. You’ll also be joining us at an important time as we seek to reach more and more people in the UK. We want everyone in the UK to know that they don’t have to bank with a bank. They can choose a modern mutual instead. 

What to do next

If this role is for you, please click the ‘Apply Now’ button. You’ll need to attach your up-to-date CV and answer a few quick questions for us. We’d also like to see a portfolio of some of your work.

We respond to everyone, so we will be in contact shortly after the closing date to let you know the outcome of your application. 

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